Autonomous navigation of a tracked unmanned ground vehicle*

This work proposes a complete autonomous navigation system for a tracked vehicle. The system enables a complete autonomous execution of waypoint and patrolling tasks selected by the user. It also enables user-vehicle shared autonomy, switching between the user teleoperation and the vehicle autonomous operation. Our navigation system uses the model predictive control scheme based on a navigation function. We propose the navigation function which takes into account changing environments, any-shape footprint, and non-holonomic motion of the tracked vehicle. Besides the waypoint and patrolling tasks, we implemented a fail-safe scenario in case of the user-vehicle communication loss, in which the vehicle returns autonomously to the previously visited goal where the communication was stable. The efficiency of the proposed system is validated by experimental results on the Komodo tracked vehicle.